by Steven Gore
“Brandon Meyer was mugged a week or two before Charlie got shot.”
“No shit?”
“He wanted Charlie to get his wallet back.”
“Why didn’t Meyer report it?”
“I think he was afraid it would slop back on his brother.”
“I don’t get it. A mugging is a mugging. Happens all the time.”
“But this one happened at night in the Tenderloin.”
“The Tenderloin?” Even Spike wouldn’t walk through the Tenderloin after sunset, and he carried two handguns and Mace. “What was the brother of a presidential candidate doing in there? That has National Enquirer written all over it.”
“Meyer claimed he cut through on his way to a meeting, but I don’t believe him.”
Spike clucked. “You not believing an exalted federal judge like him. I’m shocked, simply shocked.”
They watched the waiter deliver two Dos XXs to the Jaliscos.
“How’d you find out about the mugging?” Spike asked.
“From Socorro. Then Meyer called me to drop by, but only to make sure I didn’t pursue it.”
“Why didn’t he just cancel the credit cards and forget the whole thing?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. Could be there was something in the wallet.”
Spike grinned. “Like maybe a Viagra tablet and the cell number of a Tenderloin prostitute?”
Gage shook his head. “Unlikely. I’m not sure sex is his thing anymore. He gets off screwing over whoever shows up in his court.”
Spike laughed. “Talk about a helluva photo op. That pale-butted pipsqueak bouncing up and down between the legs of some methed-up hooker in a skid-row hotel.”
Gage cast him a sour expression. “I’m glad I already finished my lunch,” Gage said, pushing away his plate. Spike was still grinning, now red-faced. “You better finish the thought before you explode.”
“And Meyer working his little pene, yelling, ‘Motion denied! Motion denied!’ ”
Spike laughed, stomach bouncing, until tears formed at the corners of his eyes. He wiped them with his napkin. “Man, what an image.”
“Are you done ruining my meal?”
“I hope so.” Spike rubbed his side. “I think I pulled a muscle.”
One of the Jaliscos walked over to the jukebox, dropped in fifty cents, then punched a button. He returned to his table as an accordion blast began “El Corrido Contrabando,” a ballad celebrating Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Lord of the Skies, a Mexican who smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine in 727s, then faked dying during plastic surgery and retired to Colombia.
“Is that song for your benefit?” Gage asked.
“No. They think I’m an insurance salesman. Just a guy selling term life.” Spike grinned again. “When I’m really pushing life terms.”
Gage shook his head. “You still get a kick out of this.”
“That’s why I can’t bring myself to retire. It’s even hard to think about it.”
Spike’s grin faded as his sentence trailed off. He paused, his face turned somber.
“Middle age is weird. You think about things you never thought about before. It hit me the other night that from the moment my father came across the border, he never felt at home again anywhere. Not in Mexico and not in Arizona, even after he became a citizen.” Spike tapped the gold badge clipped to his belt under his jacket. “And I’m not sure I really felt at home until I got this piece of metal. Maybe that’s why he wanted me to follow you up here. Kinda makes it hard to give it up.”
Spike paused again, thinking, then his eyes brightened. “Well, that and Placita. She couldn’t stand me hanging around the house all the time.”
“She tell you that?”
“Straight out, the first time I talked about it. Then she reached for the phone and threatened to make her nephew give me a job driving one of his cabs—until I showed her a news article saying it was more dangerous than being a cop.”
“But she’d made her point.”
“Yeah, big time.”
Spike pulled his case log out of the manila envelope.
“That’s another thing.” Spike skimmed down the chronology. “Charlie wouldn’t tell me how he got over to Geary Street where he got shot, but I think he took a taxi. A Checker cab driver remembered dropping off somebody who resembled Charlie two blocks away about twenty minutes before it happened. Charlie denied it was him. But I think it was.”
“So he didn’t want to use a car that could be traced to him?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Sounds like you spent as much time investigating Charlie as you did whoever shot him.”
“More. He was stonewalling. There had to be a reason, and it wasn’t a no-harm, no-foul case. A few days after he was shot he got pneumonia and it seemed like he wasn’t going to make it. Would’ve made it a homicide right then.”
“What did the neighborhood canvass turn up?”
“We got a possible ID of Charlie at a coffee shop. Eyewitness IDs are bad enough, but this was one where the clerk had no reason to pay attention at the time. So I’m not sure what to make of it.”
Spike tilted his head toward the two men, one of whom was opening his phone. The man held it to his ear, nodded, then snapped it closed. Thirty seconds later, a younger Hispanic man entered and pulled a chair up to the Jaliscos’ table and set down a small black canvas duffel, stretched tight by its contents. He was dressed in Levi’s and oversized sweatshirt and wearing wraparound sunglasses.
“Looks like they’re going to do the deal right here,” Gage said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was heroin in that bag. They wouldn’t need a briefcase of money to buy so few kilos of cocaine.”
Spike punched redial on his phone, reported in to the surveillance officers driving down Mission Street toward the restaurant, then disconnected.
The three men kept casting quick glances around the restaurant, too often for Spike to risk another photo.
“They’re bringing a dog,” Spike said, sliding his phone into his jacket pocket. “He’ll take a little sniff as they walk outside.” He smiled. “Then off to the pokey.” He pushed his plate away. “What’re you working on besides Charlie?”
“The main one is a trade secrets case. Fiber-optic switches. My clients developed a switch—a kind of splitter—that tripled fiber-optic line capacity. FiberLink. The owners mortgaged their houses and borrowed from their retirement accounts to fund their research. Really nice people. The brains were two women who used to work at Intel. They came up with the switch on their own time, then brought in some friends to form the company.”
“What happened?”
“One of their husbands smuggled out the design and sold it to OptiCom, which used it as the backbone for their bid to wire Western Europe, and they won. I chased him around Europe for a couple of weeks, then cornered him in Zurich. I brought him back and delivered him to the FBI.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“Jealousy. He thought his wife was cheating on him.”
“Was she?”
“I don’t think so, but it still wouldn’t justify what he did.”
Spike looked over at an abandoned newspaper on the next table, an unopened business section lying on top. “How much was the European contract worth?”
“Billions and billions and billions. OptiCom’s stock went through the roof. The world’s biggest fiber-optic company doubled in value overnight.”
“I’ll bet their stock is going to tank when this hits the news. I mean really plummet.” Spike smiled, then rubbed his hands together. “Maybe it’s time for a little insider trading. I’ve been doing a little reading. Seems there’s a way to make a lot of money if you know a stock is going to crash.”
Gage smiled back. “Too bad you don’t know of one.”
“Yeah.” Spike sighed. “Way too bad. I guess I’ll have to keep making money the old-fashioned way. Slurping at the public trough.”
Gage poi
nted at the envelope. “What’s next?”
“Retrace my steps, see if I missed anything. But I’ll lay off for a while if you’re going to do something. You’re probably in a better position anyway, what with the attorney-client privilege issues.”
“That’s fine. I’ll make it quick. I need to make sure whatever Charlie was up to doesn’t snap back at Socorro again.”
Spike and Gage both alerted to the Jaliscos leaning back against the window next to them. The newcomer’s hand was under his sweatshirt.
“Something’s going sour,” Gage said. “Maybe it’s a rip-off.”
The newcomer angled his chair away from the Jaliscos, giving himself a view of the rest of the restaurant. He glanced around, his eyes hesitating when they fell on the cook and the waiter behind the counter to Gage’s left, then on Gage and Spike, as if counting the number of witnesses who’d have to be eliminated.
Gage caught the waiter’s eye, then tilted his head toward the kitchen. The waiter nodded his understanding: If two witnesses escaped there would be no reason kill the remaining ones.
The newcomer caught the motion and pushed himself to his feet. Seconds later all three dealers were waving guns at one another, then at the waiter, the cook, Spike, and Gage.
Spike slipped his right hand under the table and rested it on his gun while Gage rose with his hands up and eased toward the counter. Three barrels tracked his movement. The newcomer yelled, “Freeze, asshole.” But Gage took a final step, coming to a stop in front of the cook and waiter.
The waiter pulled the cook to the floor with him and used Gage and the counter for cover as they crawled into the kitchen and toward the back door.
Gage lowered his hands and pointed at the weapons.
“Why don’t you guys take your business outside?”
The Jaliscos swung their guns toward the newcomer.
Spike repeated Gage’s question as an order. “Tomen sus negocios afuera.”
He was now aiming his semiautomatic at the Jaliscos, his elbows propped on the table and using a double-handed grip.
“Just walk away,” Spike said. “Nobody’s gonna stop you.”
The newcomer looked back and forth between Spike and Gage, but spoke to the Jaliscos: “Estamos chidos.” We’re cool.
The three looked at one another, then one of the Jaliscos reached down for the briefcase of cash, while the newcomer picked up his bag. They backed toward the entrance, then slipped their guns into their pockets as they turned and stepped outside into the glare of the afternoon sun—and into the sights of racking police shotguns.
Following six cars behind Gage as he drove up Mission Street toward his office, the Texan spoke into his cell phone.
“He met with a Mexican cop for lunch. Then a little fun and games with some narco-wetbacks.”
“Could you tell what Gage was up to?”
The Texan snapped back: “You think I can read his mind?”
“Why didn’t you get a table next to them?”
“And get caught in a crossfire?”
“What do you mean, crossfire?”
“It’s not important. Anyway, it would’ve been stupid to go inside. Gage is like a bloodhound. His nose snapped toward those beaners the second they walked in the place. He would’ve sniffed me out in a heartbeat.”
Chapter 12
Where do we stand?” Gage asked Alex Z the next morning.
Alex Z was hunched over his keyboard, his face inches from one of the monitors standing on his desk.
“I decrypted a spreadsheet using the name of Charlie’s boat, but everything in it is coded except the numbers.”
Alex Z pressed a couple of keys. A file opened. Gage saw subtotaled and totaled columns with dates at the top, and to the far left, a column of gibberish, a mixture of letters and numbers.
“What’s your guess?” Gage asked.
“There are no negative numbers, so it’s probably not money going in and then coming out again. So if it’s really money, it’s either all in or all out.”
“How much?”
Alex Z scrolled to the bottom of the spreadsheet. “About ten million on this one.”
“Maybe he was tracking financial transactions in a case. Have you tried decoding the label column?”
Alex Z scratched his head. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that, boss.”
“Stymied?”
“Yeah.”
Gage smiled. “You’ll figure it out. Anything else in there?”
“Lots and lots. I’m still trying to decode them.”
Gage glanced down at a stack of billing records. Alex Z’s eyes followed.
“I sorted those by case and by date,” Alex Z said. “But there’s not much there. About thirteen thousand outstanding, spread among three cases.”
“I guess he really was closing down. Viz said Charlie used to clear about three hundred thousand a year.”
Alex Z pointed at the printouts. “All he had going was the yacht tax fraud, an earth-moving accident that killed an oil executive’s kid, and a dispute between Paramount and Universal over film rights.”
“What about Brandon Meyer’s mugging? Did he put time in for that?”
“No. But he kept all the receipts. Cab fare. Posters. Restaurant receipts.”
“Restaurant receipts? From where?”
“Ground Up Coffee Shop on Geary. One from a week before he got shot and one just the day before.”
Gage recognized the name. He’d remembered driving past it on his way from downtown out to the Presidio. It was a few blocks away from where Charlie had been shot and from where Spike suspected a Checker cab had dropped him off.
“Look and see whether he saved any Ground Up receipts from other visits,” Gage said. “Maybe it was his regular place to meet people in that part of town.”
“Already did. It doesn’t show up at all in his accounting records, but neither do these two.”
“Maybe was waiting to enter them until the case was over,” Gage said.
“It would be the first time. I checked the tax fraud and the other cases. He entered the costs the same day he spent the money.”
“Could be that he was getting a little lax since he was near the end of the career, then got shot and trapped inside his body.”
Gage scanned the spreadsheet displayed on the monitor.
“Why would Charlie encrypt this and code it too?” Gage asked. “One or the other should’ve been enough.” He reached for the mouse, clicked twice, opening the hidden document properties, including the author and the company that created it.
“He didn’t put this spreadsheet together,” Alex Z said, taping the author field on the screen. “Who is CEB?”
“Or what is CEB? It’s also listed as the company.”
“I wonder whether CEB sent it over coded, then Charlie encrypted it for extra security.”
“Maybe,” Gage said. “How many encrypted files are left?”
“About thirty. Plus two encrypted folders. I have no idea how many files are in those. I haven’t been able to decrypt his password file yet.”
“Print out whatever you can and have Tansy put them in my safe.” Gage settled back in his chair and stared at the screen. “This is all very interesting, but—”
“But it may have nothing to do with why Charlie was shot.”
“Exactly. Charlie had a lot to hide. We could uncover a dozen different schemes, but still never find out which was the one that ended with the bullet that cut him in half.”
Chapter 13
You Toby?” Gage asked the twenty-five-year-old steaming milk behind the granite counter at Ground Up Coffee Shop.
“That’s me,” Toby answered, looking up at Gage. “Is this about the car accident? I talked to the adjuster yesterday.”
Gage shook his head. “A customer.” He pointed toward the front window. “And about something that happened down the street.”
“Sure. I got a break in ten. You want something to drink?”
> “Decaf.”
“Cappuccino? Espresso? Mocha Macchiato?”
“Just a decaf coffee.”
Toby grinned. “You must be from out of town.”
“Thirty years ago.”
Toby waved off Gage’s money and said he’d bring the coffee to his table.
Gage grabbed a New York Times strung on a three-foot wooden dowel from a wall mount, then took the rear table in the narrow café. A few minutes later, Toby delivered the coffee and sat down.
“So what’s up, Decaf?”
Gage pulled a photo of Charlie Palmer from his suit pocket.
“You remember a cop coming in here a few months ago asking about this guy?”
Toby took the photo. “Sure. Different picture, but I think it’s the same guy. Got shot or something, right?”
“Yeah.”
Toby set it down. “He doing okay?”
“He didn’t make it.”
“Sorry to hear that.” Toby paused and shook his head, then pointed at Gage’s coffee. “You want sugar or something?”
“No thanks.”
Gage took a confirmatory sip.
“What’s your part in this?” Toby asked.
“I’m a private investigator.”
Gage handed him a business card.
“Graham Gage,” Toby said, reading it line by line. “I heard of you. This guy’s family must have big, big bucks.”
“Not so big.”
“I didn’t mean that. I’m happy to help out. No charge.”
Toby inspected Gage’s face. “How come you don’t look like a PI?”
“How is one supposed to look?”
“You know, grizzled. And not so tall. You look like a guy who thinks for a living, not somebody who mixes it up in back alleys.”
“Mixes it up with whom?”
Toby shrugged. “The bad guys, I guess.”
Gage smiled. “I’ll go look for some after we’re done and let you know how it turns out.”
Toby picked up the photo again. “I think this is the same guy who was in here, but I’m not sure.” He rocked his head side to side. “Maybe I’m just remembering the other photo.”
